by Rachel Vail
March 10, Wednesday
I got a Superstar for being quiet.
I am always quiet. Well, almost always. If I got a Superstar every time I was quiet this year, I would have a whole constellation of Superstars. I would be the total Superstar champion.
Gianni Schicci asked why I am so frowny lately. I said I had lost my favorite stuffed animal. He said, “You don’t still play with stuffed animals, do you?” So I had to say, “No, of course not.” He turned a little red and quickly said, “No, me neither.”
Then he walked away fast.
Well, at least he didn’t mock me. I might have had to knock him down if he did; that’s how sad and angry I am at this whole thing. I don’t even care if I get sent to the principal’s office.
Instead of taking Qwerty for a walk, I let him out the back door. He was perfectly happy, but I got in trouble anyway. He could get hit by a car or run away. It was very irresponsible of me. They expect more from me.
Only Qwerty likes me in my family, and I wish he would not like me quite so much, or so droolily.
March 11, Thursday
I got called out of student council to go to the nurse’s office, because, the teacher said, my sister was there and needed me. On my way there, I was going over and over Mom’s and Dad’s cell phone numbers, just in case they had to be called to come to school or the hospital. I was picturing riding in an ambulance with Elizabeth, and in my imagination I was very brave and not freaking out at all. I told myself to pretend to be brave once I got there, even if I wasn’t really, and that that kind of faking is not the same as lying. Elizabeth would need me to be calm and strong, I told myself, so that is what I would pretend to be.
When I got to the nurse’s office, Elizabeth was sitting nicely in a chair, waiting for me. She wasn’t bleeding or puking or panicking or dying in any visible way.
We said hi to each other and then I looked at the nurse, who explained that Elizabeth had a loose tooth that had bled a little tiny drop (“a lot,” Elizabeth interrupted) and that the blood had freaked Elizabeth out. She had apparently told the nurse she’d feel better if she could just get a hug from me, and that’s why the nurse sent for me.
“Oh,” I said.
I hugged Elizabeth. She hugged me back tight. Then she showed me her slightly wiggly tooth, I said, “cool,” and then I walked her back to her class.
She held my hand and smiled the whole way.
March 12, Friday
We had to hand in our final project ideas for Dinosaur Day.
Mine stinks.
It is:
I will show the difference between the brain and spinal cord of a human being and of a stegosaurus. I will measure my spinal cord and cut string that length, then attach it to a balloon the size of my two fists/brain. I will also cut 60 feet of string for the right length of a steg spinal cord, and attach it to a walnut.
I wrote that down and handed it in.
It occurs to me that if I fail out of third grade, I will have to do the year over. Which would really stink. Eventually I could end up 37 years old and still a third grader.
I’d probably rock at dodgeball by then, though.
March 13, Saturday
Little League?
Could we get a week off, for goodness’ sake?
March 14, Sunday
Elizabeth lost her tooth.
I mean she really, fully lost it.
It was bleeding a little this morning and I guess Elizabeth really is allergic to the taste of blood because it made her throw up. Right into the kitchen sink. Luckily we have a garbage disposal so after she finished, Mom ran the water and turned on the garbage disposal to get rid of it. I had run out into the living room because puking is high on my list of no thank you activities to witness.
Elizabeth came and sat down next to me on the couch. Qwerty trotted after her and put his head on Elizabeth’s lap. Elizabeth tried to convince me to let Qwerty at least smell my hand. I didn’t want to explain, again, that the dog’s huge teeth are about an inch from his wet nose, so thanks anyway. So I just said I wasn’t in the mood.
Elizabeth thought it was not that I was scared of Qwerty but that I was feeling sad again about Wingnut, so she smiled all loving at me and said she was sure I would find Wingnut really soon.
I almost cried at that, not because she was right or wrong or because it was so nice of her to try to reassure me, but because I had for that one moment forgotten to feel sad about Wingnut. Which made me feel SO guilty, like now maybe Wingnut would never come back to me. But I didn’t cry, because I got distracted—by the huge hole in Elizabeth’s mouth.
“What happened to your tooth?” I asked her.
“Nothing,” she said, and then touched the place with her tongue, and made a weird possibly-about-to-puke-again noise inside her throat.
“It fell out?” I asked her.
She nodded, turning green.
“When?”
She shrugged.
“Maybe while you were puking!”
We both ran into the kitchen and dared each other to put our hands down the garbage disposal to feel around for the tooth, which, even if we were allowed to do such a dangerous thing and Mom wouldn’t kill us or our hands wouldn’t get grinded off, I still no way would do it, especially to dig through the puke.
We screamed for Mom but she wouldn’t do it, either.
March 15, Monday
Mom used the garbage disposal this morning after breakfast.
I thought Elizabeth was going to shatter every window in the house with her screaming.
She didn’t even care about the golden dollar she got from the tooth fairy. Though she did thank me for writing the tooth fairy a note explaining the fully lost tooth situation.
I hardly slept all night, on the lookout in case an actual fairy really came to our house and was a nasty one.
March 16, Tuesday
Gianni Schicci cheats.
He said he didn’t get tagged in Lawyers in the Underworld but he totally did, and then he quit and went to hang out by the fence. Noah and I were kind of the leaders of Lawyers in the Underworld because we invented it, and we were explaining to the other kids about you have a secret spot of weakness and if you can get through the third level of Underworld Trials without a ghoul using a power (like fire, or spit, depending on the ghoul) against you, you’d go up to the ghost level of peril. But in the middle, Gianni started screaming that he had found Witchie Poo.
So we of course all had to run and check it out.
It really did look like Witchie Poo. Montana C. laughed and said it was just dog poo. She and Xavier and I weren’t scared. Daisy looked a little unsure. (Like I felt.)
Then Gianni got the idea of touching the poo that might have been Witchie Poo with a stick and chasing everybody with it.
I ran away fast because I don’t honestly care what kind of poo it was on that stick; I still would prefer not to be touched with it.
March 17, Wednesday
It’s Saint Patrick’s Day. Also Gingy’s birthday. (Also my day to walk Qwerty, which I got Poopsie to do with me.)
We are not Irish but we all wear green for Gingy’s birthday in my family, because green is her favorite color and when she was a little girl she always thought everybody wore green on her birthday in her honor.
Except every year when she tells us that story when we go out to dinner for her birthday, she doesn’t say, “When I was a little girl.” She says, “When I was a girl.”
And every year I wonder if she means that now she is a boy.
Which she definitely is not.
March 18, Thursday
We had time in school to work on our Dinosaur Day project.
Gianni Schicci kept trying to look at my paper.
I didn’t let him. It’s not that I was scared of getting caught.
He should do his own work.
Also, he should not chase people with poo on a stick.
Or say he wasn’t tagged when he totall
y was.
March 19, Friday
Noah is sick. He hasn’t been in school since Tuesday. There is a rumor that he got witchie sickness from the Witchie Poo. Nobody really believes it but I called him when I got home from school just in case.
He has bronchitis, not witchie sickness. But he is feeling better. That’s good because his birthday party is tomorrow, and it would be weird to have it without him.
March 20, Saturday
Noah didn’t have to go to Little League because of getting over bronchitis. He didn’t miss much. We lost, 3–1. I struck out all three times I was up, though Dad said I had good swings—now it’s just about connecting with the ball. That one little element of the thing is all that’s messing me up, apparently. That would be a problem mitt-wise, too, since balls generally don’t connect with my mitt any more than they do with my bat, but I solve that by going as far out as possible into left field and making sure Gianni Schicci is in front of me. Luckily Gianni is a total ball hog.
Baseball is my favorite sport. It’s much more relaxing than my other sports. (Or walking Qwerty, which I did by myself today but only got just past the driveway before I felt like my heart might burst, so we went back.)
After the game we went straight to Noah’s party, which was at a paint-on-pottery place. It was the first party of the year where girls and boys were both invited.
I ended up sitting next to Daisy. We didn’t talk to each other.
Well, at the end I said her unicorn was really good. And she whispered that she liked how I painted my bear.
I almost told her about losing Wingnut, but the cake came out and it was time to sing so I didn’t.
March 21, Sunday
It’s the first day of spring, and it is freezing cold and raining out.
Nobody has slept on the Pillow of Honor for a long time. I am keeping it clear just in case Wingnut finds his way back to the bed when I am not looking.
March 22, Monday
Dinosaur Day is Friday and we are very far from ready. We have to hand in our final drafts of our research papers by tomorrow.
I wish I had chosen a dinosaur with a shorter name than stegosaurus. Like T. rex.
Maybe I could just write “steg” so my hand doesn’t fall the heck off.
March 23, Tuesday
Well, I handed it in, my final draft. I think I did okay. Some of the stuff I read (and wrote) did not make a lot of sense to me (like stuff about genus, which is not at all the same as genius, and a lot of words in Greek, which I don’t speak).
I liked that stegosaurus means “roof lizard” so I included that even though it is not strictly about its brain.
They could have called it “bus lizard” because it was the size and weight of a bus, even though its brain weighed less than half as much as the yogurt I took for lunch today.
So I ate more than two steg brain’s worth of yogurt today.
Ew.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll bring a sandwich.
March 24, Wednesday
Xavier Schwartz came for a playdate.
I let him hold Qwerty’s leash when we walked him.
Xavier wishes he had Qwerty as a pet.
Me too.
Except for the fact that Bad Boy hasn’t been around since Qwerty moved in with us. As far as I know.
But still.
Anyway, Mom said no, Xavier could take home a cookie but not our dog.
Other than that it was not a terrible playdate. And now we have reciprocated, which is what Mom said we at least had to do, so maybe I don’t have to play with Xavier Schwartz again until fourth grade. If ever.
March 25, Thursday
Everybody pitched in to help with the Dinosaur Day project. Instead of just a balloon the size of my brain, we made a papier-mâché brain on top of the balloon. Elizabeth tore newspapers into strips, Mom and Dad dipped them in the glunky paste, and I smoothed the strips onto the balloon. It was gross but cool. While that was drying, Dad measured my spine and we cut a string that size (15 inches) and then measured out the 60 feet for the steg’s spinal cord, and Krazy Glued one end to a walnut. Mom had to buy a whole bag of them just so I could have one.
“Anybody want a walnut?” she asked, holding the full-except-one-walnut bag.
“Justin should put them in a basket to give them out to everybody at Dinosaur Day,” Elizabeth suggested.
“Why would I give out walnuts?” I asked. I admit I was a little cranky because even though my project was okay, it wasn’t great. Noah had made a T. rex head out of a football helmet and his parents bought a Polaroid camera to take pictures of each kid wearing it and you get to bring the picture home. Or, from me, they could have, hooray, a nut.
“You could make a sign and attach it to the basket and the sign would say, ‘Free Stegosaurus Brains!’ ”
Which I had to admit, even though she was in kindergarten, was a totally awesome idea.
March 26, Friday
Dinosaur Day was excellent.
We set the whole thing up in the auditorium and all the grades came. The projects were so cool: Montana C. made dinosaur footprints in clay and you could measure yours against them, and Noah’s was great with the T. rex helmet, and Xavier Schwartz made a card game that should totally be a real thing in stores, with all the dinosaurs and their attack powers and defense powers and you try to demolish each other. Daisy did a diorama of an oviraptor trying to steal eggs and a mom dinosaur fighting him off. She is very artistic. (Daisy, not the mom dinosaur.)
Bartholomew Wiggins did something to do with apatosaurus DNA, which I didn’t really get, but it filled up a huge opening-poster-board thing. And he dressed up as a paleontologist, which was pretty funny.
But what a lot of people kept saying, all day long, was, “Check out my steg brain! Go get a steg brain—free—from that kid with the curly hair over there!”
Even Ms. Termini and Ms. Burns took steg brains.
That felt really, really good.
March 27, Saturday
Before Little League, Dad and I did extra pop-up practice.
Dad said when he was a kid he always used to imagine playing center field for the Yankees. He asked if I ever imagine doing that.
I shook my head. I said sometimes I imagine I am in a bakery.
Dad didn’t seem so impressed with that imagining.
March 28, Sunday
Today we cooked. We’re going to celebrate Passover tomorrow night at my cousins’ house.
Awesome. Can’t wait.
And then the fun will continue. Because guess where we are going for vacation! Disney World? LEGOLAND? Australia?
Wrong.
Mom and Dad have to work. So we are going to have a “stay cation,” which means stay home and do a big fat nothing over vacation, and Gingy and Poopsie are going to come and take care of us and feed us food that jiggles, probably.
March 29, Monday
I do not have a bad attitude.
I have car sickness.
The New Jersey Turnpike should be called the New Jersey Parking Lot. The only thing that cheered me up about being on it was not being at my cousins’ house yet.
March 30, Tuesday
Sometimes things turn out better than you think they will.
I was all, What if I have to ask the Four Questions and What if my cousins slime me again and Maybe we should have brought flashlights just in case there is a blackout in the middle of the night while we’re there and we can’t find our way around and we have to pee.
But none of that happened.
It was actually fun. My cousins metamorphosized into human beings and also they got a new game system that we were allowed to play before the Passover Seder. Then at the Seder we did a lot of singing and the grown-ups drank wine and we drank grape juice and the only person who spilled was Mom.
My cousins asked the Four Questions. I was the oldest kid at the table. Elizabeth said the four sons in the Passover story were like the four of us: I was the wise one, she was the
wicked one, Dermot was the dim-witted one, and Dylan was the baby. I told her she wasn’t wicked and she said, “You know I am sometimes, Justin.” It was nice that she thought I was wise.
And that there wasn’t a blackout.
March 31, Wednesday
The Jersey Turnpike is no better going south than going north.
Except that Gingy and Poopsie bought us electronics to play all the way home, until we both had to take a break and stare at the horizon to keep us from puking.
April 1, Thursday
I woke up this morning and realized I had no worries at all anymore.
I am not afraid of bad guys or jiggly food or getting beat up by runny-aroundy kids or loud noises or death or dogs that growl.
I have become the bravest kid in the world.
April Fools.
April 2, Friday
Mom and Dad think we can’t hear when they are fighting but we can.
Elizabeth came into my room way after lights-out when we were supposed to be sleeping and Mom and Dad were going over their papers. They were working on their taxes and they kept not finding the receipt or the bill or the paper they needed.
Elizabeth tiptoed into my room, climbed up my ladder, and scrunched into the bottom corner of my bed. I asked her what was wrong.
She asked, “Why are they fighting?”
I said, “They aren’t fighting, really. They are just worried about taxes. It happens every year.”
